A Monkey in the Central Kingdom

By Carl Aass

After spending several decades informally studying Chinese history, language, and culture, a chance to teach at the Nanjing Institute of Technology afforded the author an opportunity to finally live and work in China.

This book covers his travels at a turning point in Chinese history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DC Canada Education Publishing
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781772057041

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PREFACE

In Chinese history, the Emperor ruled by virtue of a mandate from Heaven. Validation of this authorization was reflected in good government and general well-being in the land. However, if mismanagement of the country led to hard times and general suffering, Heaven would send a signal—traditionally, floods, earthquakes, famine, barbarian invasions, and uprisings—that the mandate had been lost. While the natural disasters were pretty clear indications of Heaven’s dissatisfaction, the latter two could be subject to interpretation. Fortunately, there was a way to tell if the invasion or uprising reflected the end of the line for the dynasty: if they succeeded, Heaven was in fact through with the regime, and it was time for an adjustment.

The first half of the 20th century was a time of dynastic change in China—from the Qing Dynasty to the Chinese Communist Party Dynasty. There was also 150 years of humiliation, initially at the hands of European nations, then of Japan. First, the British forced the Chinese to allow the importation of opium to somewhat balance the trade deficit between the two nations. Then followed a series of unequal treaties, forced extraterritorial concessions (Canton, Shanghai, Qingdao, Tianjin), onerous reparation payments, and various other face-destroying measures. This only ended with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the early thirties, and then as much of the country that Japan could grab by 1941.

In the context of classical Chinese political theory, it is not surprising, therefore, to conclude that the Mandate of Heaven was up for grabs, and on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party became the latest Chinese dynasty—metaphorically speaking, of course. There followed roughly three decades of muddling about until a clear direction for the country was found. Errors were made, wrong directions tried—the Hundred Flowers

Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution to name the most egregious. The latter two campaigns came with a cost in human lives of tens of millions each, not to mention catastrophic delays in the economic development of the nation.

With the passing of Chairman Mao, a new era started to open up, and it was my good fortune to be in China for several months as this historic change was set in motion. One could be in rural Shanxi Province and watch a farmer tilling his plot of land, using the same technology as was used in the Han Dynasty, two millennia ago. The next day in Shanghai, one could watch in awe the initial steps towards modernization being taken, which would result in China’s moving comfortably into the 21st century with ambition to become the next hegemon. This book combines the perspective of a student of China visiting for the first time and a picture of China beginning a transformation of historic proportions.

My arrival in Shanghai in the fall of 1986 had been preceded by some dozen years of formal and informal preparation, reflecting my growing interest in China. History and culture, of course, but also the Chinese language. This was in part triggered during a lunchtime conversation with a couple of exchange students from Hong Kong, who were working in my department for a year. During the conversation, from time to time, they would lapse into Cantonese. As an informal student of languages, I always found languages fascinating, and would ask what they were saying, and how did this or that sentence or phrase work in Chinese. But their overarching attitude towards a Westerner showing interest in Chinese was that it was a very complicated and difficult language, one that Westerners should not attempt as they would inevitably be discouraged and quit. The implicit message was that Chinese was too tough for a Westerner: you are simply not smart enough. That same message had been delivered by several Chinese people. This arrogance really pissed me off.

My curiosity about the Chinese language was matched by similar curiosity about China itself. Throughout history, East (China) and West (essentially Europe) had evolved and developed cultures in isolation from each other, and the lack of knowledge about the other was profound. This mutual ignorance only deepened during much of the 20th century: the brief opening up of China to the West in the early part of the century was quickly stifled, first by Japanese

aggressions in China, then during the first decades of Mao’s New China. It was an intriguing mystery to me, and being born under the sign of the Monkey, I was as curious as a cat, although hopefully without the same fate as the one in the adage.

In my mind, the price of entry to a culture is the acquisition of the language; without this, one can only be a tourist. Naturally, either the Cantonese or Mandarin dialects would be a challenge, but beyond that, it contradicted much of what I thought of as immutable laws of linguistics. Of course, I also remembered that lunch conversation of a few years ago: It’s too hard for you. Indeed, many aspects of the language really made no sense—consider a language that has virtually no gender, little distinction between singular or plural, no definite articles, no tenses. And then there is the phonetic poverty of the language—whereas English language has something over 15,000 syllables, Chinese makes do with 413. 413! How does all this work? According to aeronautical engineers, it is highly unlikely that a bumblebee would be able to fly. Similarly, it might be felt highly unlikely that the Chinese language could serve as a means of communication, yet it obviously does—and

I was intrigued.

I resolved to take a Chinese language course and enrolled in an evening Mandarin 101 class at the University of Ottawa. My first humiliation courtesy of the Chinese language began within a few lessons—I was one of three Westerners taking the course and the other 40 students were Cantonese-speaking engineering and computer science students taking the elective for an easy credit. Needless to say, we three big-noses were the class idiots. As the three of us flailed and flopped about, our Cantonese-speaking compatriots quickly bridged the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese and were off and running. While I was hacking away at the four tones, the guy next to me was writing poetry. I was so stunned at finding myself at the bottom of the class that I didn’t even think about the opinion of those two exchange students from Hong Kong. Good thing too… I probably would have quit if I did.

I was sure that I had failed the course miserably; at the final aural exam, when listening to a sentence or a question over the earphones, I was unable to pick out a word—any word!—from a spoken sentence. The concept of answering the question, never mind understanding it, was as remote a possibility as a

hummingbird’s of grasping the basic concepts of quantum physics. Inexplicably, I got a B as a final mark as a gentle and indulgent pat on the head—doubtlessly the lowest mark in the class. Unlike the hummingbird, however, I stayed focused and resolved to take another shot at the language. With varying degrees of competence in several European languages, I was determined not to let Chinese beat me—not without a scrap, at least. And the course did have one gratifying outcome: I met a Chinese immigrant who was tutoring Westerners in Mandarin, and one of my fellow (Westerner) students was also interested in pushing a bit further into the study of Mandarin. Charles and I signed up for lessons, once a week, from the redoubtable Mr. Liu Lian.

We were earnest learners, but possibly as bad a class of two students as a foreign language teacher could have the misfortune to run into. My classmate might not have had much of an aptitude for languages, but he had a virtually photographic memory for sounds. He could hear a song in an unknown language, sing it after one listen, but not have any idea what the words he was singing meant. I, on the other hand, was a Very Bad Student. Never did any homework and had a limited memory for foreign words; together with the fact that we only had one class a week, my progress slowed to that of a snail’s crawl across broken glass. My advantage was that I had no fear of embarrassment when flailing away in a foreign language—it is one thing to be the class idiot, and quite another to be making a valiant effort to communicate in the local language: it shows respect. In my opinion, this is one of the more important attributes one has to have to learn a foreign language successfully. Thus, while chattering on in pidgin or worse, I gradually took full possession of the Chinese that I was studying, and once a word was etched in my memory, it was mine, and I could use it effectively, if inelegantly. I owned it.

In a couple of years, I had progressed enough to start conversations with my tutor about possibly heading off to China. I had no desire to waddle into the country with no linguistic abilities, but heartened by my rather tenuous grasp of Chinese, we began discussing possibilities for a trip. As fate would have it, my tutor had some connections in Nanjing. If only we could involve a Canadian university in some sort of exchange or study abroad situation… Luckily, I knew a professor in the Architecture Faculty at Carleton University (architecture faculties are big on the Study Abroad

Experience for their students) and bingo! Arrangements were made with the Nanjing Institute of Technology for a fall term abroad for third-year Carleton architecture students. I was to be one of the professors, my area of responsibility being to give a course in the history and philosophy of Chinese art and architecture, in addition to serving as a go-between and general resource person.

After spending half my life trying to understand the mystery that was China through the swirling mists of cultural differences, linguistic obstacles, and political misunderstandings, I was finally going to go to China, with my knowledge of the country’s history and language as my passport and visa.

CHAPTER ONE—ARRIVAL IN SHANGHAI

Several months flew by as all arrangements were completed, and finally I was approaching Shanghai’s Hong Qiao Airport as excited as a four-year-old on first sighting Santa Claus. As we circled lower and lower, the landscape was unlike anything I had seen—small villages of a few dozen houses, crisply defined by chartreuse rice paddies, muddy canals, and stagnant fishponds. Canals everywhere, with fat barges and sampans slowly drifting along like turds in a drainage ditch. Given the flatness of the landscape, and the apparent height of the water table mere inches below the surface, I would guess that Shanghai’s mean altitude was a few meters above sea level. With the obligatory jolt and the traditional squeak of tires, we had landed. Then the customary confusion as hundreds of passengers stood up, crowded the aisles, wrestled their carry-on bags down from the overhead compartments, and waited. Finally the line started to inch out into… a furnace.

The 100% humidity and 40-degree temperature combined to fog one’s glasses and take one’s breath away. Welcome to China; welcome to Shanghai, Whore of the Orient. Dazed, jet-lagged, half-drunk, we passed through various checkpoints on the way out of the airport— customs, immigration, quarantine, police—without any complications. We were met at the exit by Mr. Xiao Wang, a representative of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of our host institution, the Nanjing Institute of Technology.

Let me pause here. First aside: the Chinese language is telegraphic. It is as if the complexities of characters, synonyms, homophones, and tones lead speakers of the language to simplify and shorten things as much as possible. So, once the name of our sponsoring institution, Nan Jing Gong Xue Yuan in Chinese, had been established as a topic in a conversation, it could be shortened, specifically in the present case to Nangong, which is what I will use to refer to it from now on.

Second aside: I mentioned that we were met by Xiao Wang, meaning Little Wang, Wang being the family name. Attaching Little to his family name is not an insult; it is simply a polite way of referring to someone younger than oneself. His full name was Wang Da Wei—family name Wang first; given name Da Wei after. At the other end, someone older, respected, or in some way senior to the speaker is addressed as old, Lao; If Xiao Wang was the director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau, or older than the speaker, he would be addressed as Lao Wang, or Old Wang. In this context it is helpful to recall the traditional Chinese respect for their elders. Therefore, no disrespect; if anything, the opposite. Although I must admit, it did grate

to hear myself addressed as Old Aass.

Finally, a few words on given names… in Chinese there are none. A given name is simply a couple of words chosen for some sort of significance. For example, Wang Da Wei’s given meaning was Great Power Wang. The husband of Chen Wei, the Nangong professor who was to accompany us for a few weeks of our peregrinations, was named Wang Jian Guo—Build the Nation Wang. He was born during the Cultural Revolution, and the spirit of the times dictated a patriotic name. Another winning name from that era was Smash America; a nicer one was that of another Nangong professor, Zhu Guang Ya, who was born in 1941; his mother used his given name, Light of Asia, to show her faith that there would eventually be a light over Asia once the war was over.

Onwards. Xiao Wang took us under his wing: a couple of minibuses had been arranged, one for the luggage and one for us profs and students. All aboard, and off to our temporary home in Shanghai, the Shanghai Music Academy. After my decades of study of China and all things Chinese, at a time when the country was closed and mistrusted in the West leaving me with many gaps and questions, everything was coming to life. It was like being allowed into the most wonderful and mysterious attic about which little was known, one nobody had ever visited—or at least such an attic which I had never visited.

The roadway into the city proper from Hong Qiao Airport was wide and chaotic. We proceeded towards our destination over an ill-defined ribbon of asphalt and gravel, through a river of assorted travelers of the night: random carts, two-wheeled tractors, donkeys, men in hardhats, trucks and buses, assorted pedestrians, cyclists, pushcarts, street vendors, and the odd car. On either side of the road, endless construction. Although it was night, all construction sites were going full blast. It seemed that the bulk of the work was being done by hand. It being past nightfall, I was surprised to see such an amount of construction. Xiao Wang informed me that this was typical; once construction started, it went on 24/7 until the project was completed. A harbinger of the power and energy of a wakening China.

A couple of things struck me as we rolled into town, one being the hard hats worn by the construction workers: they were made of rattan. Although rigid, the rattan shell would give a little under impact and so distribute the impact load, which seemed to me a good idea for protecting the cranium. The second was the scaffolding supporting the construction of new buildings which was made of lengths of bamboo, tied together. Again, who had ever heard of such a thing? But upon further reflection, the engineer in

me appreciated the subtlety of this approach—the natural flexibility of the bamboo allowed for the distribution of the load the scaffolding was carrying. Not to mention it is much cheaper than, say, steel.

By reputation alone it was virtually imperative that the bicycle traffic impressed, and it did. The flow of bicycles was truly remarkable—not just for the sheer number, but for the behaviour of the cyclists. In order to function effectively as vehicles in traffic, given their relative fragility and low speed, they had to be rather assertive and impudent. As a result, they just waddled down the road with apparent indifference to all other traffic. Also, in order to strengthen their case for being taken seriously as vehicles, they had to see themselves as part of a greater unit, like a school of fish. Whereas one cyclist could be dominated rather easily by an impatient bus driver, a school of them—not so much. Our bus driver sometimes honked as it was rather the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances, but it was typically a disinterested pro forma gesture, and the bus driver’s low expectation any result from his action was matched by the high level of disinterest that the cyclists showed in getting out of his way.

Overall, on the drive in from the airport, I had two dominant impressions. One was that it was evident that Shanghai was nestled in a waterscape. Everywhere there was water: small canals, ditches, ponds covered with duckweed. The second—considering the busy construction sites, the unending flow of traffic, the small stalls and outdoor restaurants filled with customers—was one of unrelenting activity carried out in a sauna. After three decades of political disasters and economic missteps, if not China, at least Shanghai was on the move again. Everything was new, exciting, and well beyond my ken. I could hardly wait to get out and explore.

We arrived at the music academy, got clearance from the guards at the entrance, and pulled up in front of our dormitory building, although the word dormitory was quite misleading. The music academy was an educational institution predating the 1949 revolution, and the foreign students’ dormitory—our destination—was a fine old building from the early 20th century with strong French flavours. Although quite genteel in conception, the intervening decades had not been kind to the building, and a sort of delicate shabbiness permeated the dormitory like a reminder of better days gone before.

We filed out of the minibus, were introduced to various Nangong and Music Academy plenipotentiaries, were urged to meet downstairs at the reception area, and were shepherded upstairs to our dormitory rooms after which we would hie off to supper. When we reconvened, Clarence,

the other professor, and I accompanied the students over to the dining hall, a grim, dark, small room. Little light, cold food, no beer or tea, only warm Coke in dirty glasses. The service afforded by the waitstaff—a couple of grumpy ladies—could be classified as indifferent with a heavy dose of resentment.

This attitude was symptomatic of some of the difficulties of an economy based on centralized communist theory and practice. Decisions on the allocation of (scarce) resources stemmed from a centralized authority; typically Beijing had at least a finger in it, if it was not controlling the entire decision-making process. Inevitably, and notwithstanding China’s historical deftness in handling the world’s largest economy, mismatches, misallocations, and pricing errors would inevitably crop up. This applied to food, raw materials, and final products, as well as workers. Consequently, service positions—store clerks, waitresses, bus drivers—were often staffed by assignees with absolutely no interest in this or that type of work. Add to this the very limited opportunities for promotion in the service sector, the low salaries (No Tipping!), as well as the fact that during the Great Cultural Revolution this type of worker was characterized as a running dog of capitalism (serving the bourgeois and upper classes, busily sucking the blood of the working class). The end result for the diner was a waiter of monumental sullenness and glacial boredom who resented any request or question from a client as an intrusion into her meaningless life.

Once the food had arrived on the table, the tableau was complete, and the total picture was not appealing: the food looked bad (and in this, it did not disappoint), the dining room was dark and dingy, the staff exuded a resentful indifference… but Clarence and I didn’t give a shit. We were going out for dinner! So leaving the students to deal with the cafeteria staff and their offerings, both equally demoralizing, we bade a cheery Bon Appétit! to the students, and sallied forth into the Shanghai night to meet my Chinese language tutor, Liu Lian, who was in Shanghai at the time, and had invited us to his mother’s place for supper.

Out on the street, the heat and humidity were a physical presence, like warm tropical water, and the experience gave a feeling of being a first-time scuba diver, exploring a new and enchanting underwater world. The ambient sounds were similar: muted, constant, and strangely subdued, like that of breathing through a regulator. The burbeling of rising bubbles rising was substituted by an incessant tinkling of bicycle bells and the drone of cicadas.

Normally, the noise of traffic would intrude into the night, but in

Shanghai cars and buses were scarce, and it was illegal to honk or use headlights within the city limits. Furthermore, it appeared that there was a consensus that to rev an engine over 2,000 RPM was to convert the internal combustion engine into an external combustion engine; as a result, cars, trucks, and buses floated by like large fish, engines barely turning. The impression of being underwater was supported by the ambient

lighting. It was night, of course, but electricity being in short supply, there were very few streetlights. These gave a dim and mysterious tinge to the city. Similarly, there was no lighting in any of the store windows.

This feeling of being in a new and strange underwater world had an overpowering impact on me—after all the years of China-focused reading, studying, and preparation, finally I was really there. Not looking through the dirty windows of a minibus, not in the customs area of an international airport, but actually walking on Wai Hai Lu, one of the main drags of the city. Along Wai Hai Lu there were only one or two shops every few minutes’ walk. Given that Wai Hai Lu was one of Shanghai’s most famous shopping streets, and that Shanghai was the shopping Nirvana of China, it was apparent that this was not a consumer-oriented society.

Pedestrians were a common element in the Shanghai night—lots of them to be sure, but nothing out of the ordinary for me. I was used to this component of the action at street level; Hell, there were even a few pedestrians on the streets of night-time Ottawa. But the bicycles! An endless silent river, some with faint lights, most not, and the incessant chirping of bicycle bells like crickets on the prowl for some anonymous after-dark sex. Streams of bicycles splitting off here and there, temporarily backing up at an obstacle such as a red light then moving on, never beginning, never ending. The other dominant evening sound was the steady drone of cicadas, also on the prowl for anonymous night-time sex, of course.

After several minutes, we turned sharply to the right and went down a dark, narrow alleyway. A block further in, we went down a darker, narrower alleyway, flanked by four storey apartment buildings. Although it was dark, to my surprise not many people were out. In most of the southern cities I have visited, evening is the time to hang around outside, when the heat has subsided to some extent. My guess was that they all had checked into their houses and were in the process of going beddy-bye. One thing I noticed was that along the lane were long, low corrugated metal buildings, not really large enough to house a car or bicycles in North America. It was with some surprise that I noted that people were living in these sheds.

We walked all the way to the end of this lane—about 200 meters. At the end we turned into a house which had been converted into several apartments, one of which was the residence of my tutor’s mother. Her apartment apparently had three rooms, each one on a different level. On entering the building, we found ourselves in a small vestibule filled with bicycles and assorted necessities—brooms, cleaning equipment, empty flower pots, dried vegetables and other durable foodstuffs, all covered with a thick coat of dust. One half level up the stairs was a shared kitchen. It was brutally functional—not a single frill in sight, like a window, or cupboards. In North America, notwithstanding Frank Lloyd’s dictum that the kitchen is a factory for making food, the kitchen is social centre of the home, the place in the house where everybody congregates, grabs a coffee, hangs around and chats, does homework, eats and so forth. This kitchen was totally uninviting, having four separate gas burners, a sink, a fridge. Frank would have felt vindicated.

Up another half level was the first room that clearly belonged to the apartment—a tiny room of unclear function. Then up a little more into another small room. My guess was that the communal kitchen downstairs was something like 7 x 11 feet; this tiny room up from the kitchen, maybe 6 x 11 feet. The next room in which we found ourselves seemed to be a sitting room and was even smaller—6 x 10 feet. Finally, on the top level, there was a dining/living/twin-bed bedroom room. For having all in one, was a reasonable size. It was packed with furniture—wooden chests, chests of drawers, two single beds, and a dining room table with space for six or seven diners.

If you get the idea that the apartment was tiny, here’s some background.

Although the seeds of the communist party germinated in Shanghai, Mao’s spiritual base as well as the revolution itself remained in and focused on the countryside and the Chinese peasant. During Mao’s formative years, this constituted a timeless, hard-working, long-suffering human context for his view of the world. Shanghai on the other hand was essentially a Western creation, set on a path of explosive growth during the ignominy of the 19th century opium wars which started a century of humiliation for the Central Kingdom. It had therefore always had the stench of foreign influence to some nostrils, as well as the attractiveness of the exotic to others. The latter prevailed, and for virtually its entire existence, inland Chinese were drawn to Shanghai by the enchantment of the modern, the exotic, the different, as well as the economic opportunities the foreigners presented.

As a consequence, once in power in Beijing, the communist leadership harboured an on-going suspicion of Shanghai, resulting in 35 years of wilful neglect, coupled with the continuous sucking of money from the Shanghai economy—and for the first couple of decades of communist rule, Shanghai’s industrial output was the most significant in China. The national government wasn’t in the mood to assist in the upkeep and modernization of Shanghai, and Beijing obliged Shanghai to remit a significant portion of the revenues it generated, revenues necessary to improve or even maintain its infrastructure.

Adding to this neglect specific to Shanghai, after the victory over Chiang Kai Shek, the communists focused on The Four Modernizations: Industry, Agriculture, Science & Technology, and Defence. The notable absence would be anything that would directly and notably make life nicer for the population—housing being a significant element in this context. It was not even a secondary priority and so not addressed over the first 35 years of communist rule. By the mid-eighties, Shanghai found itself with totally inadequate housing and deplorable infrastructure.

This was eloquently reflected by the dingy and cramped conditions of the Liu Lian’s mother’s apartment. By the mid-eighties, the average amount of indoor residential space per capita in Shanghai was an incredible 17 square feet. By way of example: the tiny apartment in which we had congregated for supper. And that tiny kitchen with four gas burners? That was for four families. As for maintenance—by law rents were fixed at 2% of the tenant’s monthly income which typically fell between 30 to 60 yuan a month—a monthly rent of 20¢ to 40¢. This left very little for maintenance of the unit. Continuously increasing density and continuously declining quality were the results, both readily apparent as we waited for supper.

For the repast about to unfold, the six attendees included my tutor Liu Lian, Xiao Wang from Nangong, Clarence, Liu Lian’s mother, a cousin of Liu Lian’s, and your faithful narrator. Apparently, the cousin had recently been cleared to go to Hong Kong, and she was leaving China in a few days. She had been studying English for three years in school, so of course—and with the encouragement of Liu Lian—I gave her a chance to talk in English. This was also my first experience with the shyness of the Chinese in general and Chinese women in particular. Upon my first question to her,